Issue link: https://www.massageandbodyworkdigital.com/i/77424
STAYING GROUNDED True, different disciplines at different levels complement and support each other, but you must address each form of accumulation on its own terms. If you don't address each pattern on its own terms, you may get temporary or partial relief from some measure, but the pattern won't change and you'll feel endlessly vulnerable to toxicity and feeling ungrounded. Somatic indicates the experience of "an aware, embodied, living being experienced and controlled from within." Somatic education isn't another form of bodywork, but a developmental process that involves patterns of self-control. Actions performed by one person on another are not somatic, whatever physiological effects may result. Somatic implies Sometimes the change is permanent, It's about more than release, flexibility, physical structure or posture, or relief of pain; it's about awakening better internal sensory awareness of where things are in us. If you want to feel grounded, you need to develop a better integrated pattern of function. The term for this kind of development is somatic education. SOMATIC EDUCATION I've used the term somatic contagion, but before I say anything about somatic education, I feel the need to define the word somatic because, as I mean it, and as the one who coined the term—Thomas Hanna—meant it, it has a different meaning than "everything associated with the body." If that were its correct meaning, we wouldn't need the word somatic; "bodily" would do. someone's 50–50 sensory-motor (or attentional-intentional) participation in an experience, not their passivity, or even receptive passivity. The question about why a person even needs bodywork enters here. I'm not talking about how he might benefit from it, but how he got into a condition in which he would need it. We might say "injuries and stress," but the more basic answer is "his residual adaptation to injuries and stress," such as tissue changes and habituated functional patterns. Habituated means "learned, remembered, and enacted." If a person has just emerged from a bodywork session, he has some improvement over his state going in. Generally, this improvement comes from what was done to him, rather than what he learned. It was given to him. 50 massage & bodywork january/february 2011 but often he has to keep going back for more bodywork for a long time because, although bodywork addresses tissue changes directly, it addresses habit patterns indirectly. Habit patterns and behavior persist unless changed from within via a learning process. If a habit pattern is deeply ingrained (or he keeps refreshing it through repetitive actions), he tends automatically to revert to it (or to a close approximation). As long as a dysfunctional habit pattern persists as his dominant mode of function, and until he's learned his way out of it, it's what's available to him, it's what he knows, it's where he can go—and it's where he goes. The old adage, "Give a man a fish, you feed him for a day; teach him to fish, he feeds himself for a lifetime," applies. Somatic education is a developmental process, as much as a remedial one. It's about more than release, flexibility, physical structure or posture, or relief of pain; it's about awakening better internal sensory awareness of where things are in us and how we're put together (how we feel that, not how it looks on a chart), more gradation of control over muscular activity from all-out effort (full strength) to complete release of effort (complete relaxation), and better coordinated control of movement (more results from less effort). Somatic education grooms out the disorganization and interferences of injuries and stress. To the degree that functional patterns result from lifestyle and work habits, you can groom yourself of their effects. Consider how that would affect your feeling of being grounded. One might consider somatic education a form of grooming, in the old sense of the term—a process of self-development, as in being groomed for a position, as well as the sense of clean-up. It isn't